Raban - Passage to Juneau: a Sea and Its Meanings

Acclaim for JONATHAN RABANs
PASSAGE TO JUNEAU

Th[e] most unquenchably enterprising of travel writers Raban excels at distilling incident and anecdote into a quintessence of dry humor and yeasty verbal theater.

The Boston Globe

Books with both American and marine subjects abound in Rabans distinguished body of work. Passage to Juneau melds these themes together in a rich and rewarding nonfiction narrative, which can only further solidify his reputation as one of the outstanding travel writers at work today.

The Christian Science Monitor

Passage to Juneau is a highly intelligent and lushly written repository of products created by a meditative and adventurous sensibility. It has much that is brilliant, including many passages of fine descriptive writing.

The New York Times

With grace, style, and erudition, Mr. Raban stuffs the reader into his sailboats tiny cabin and makes him first mate on a journey through two centuries of a region and a half century of the authors own life.

The Wall Street Journal

A great adventure into history and myth.

Chicago Sun-Times

A moving book, one to cherish and remember.

The Denver Post

This fine book is a personal chronicle of the search for peace, one only found alone, and at sea. An unlikely adventurer and sailor, Raban weaves his yarn with an ease to be envied. Perhaps that is why many regard him as one of the best literary travel writers in the English language.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

A journey of the soul.

Newsweek

His masterly book becomes a surging current that spins off eddies in which the strands of the narrative converge. At first dazzling and droll, these whirlpools deepen and darken until, in a heartbreaking conclusion, Raban finds himself captured by the tidal forces he has so brilliantly described.

Time

A spell-binding narrative of exploration and discovery.

The News & Observer (Raleigh)

This graceful, resonant account of sailing the Inside Passage is part evocative travelogue, part personal meditation, part history.

Entertainment Weekly

Lively, engaging, fiercely personal and vastly well-informed, filled with history both cultural and natural, tart social observation and entertaining riffs.

Salon

Immense charm. A considerable triumph.

Chicago Tribune

Raban is a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. He spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. One of our most gifted observers.

Newsday

JONATHAN RABAN
PASSAGE TO JUNEAU

Jonathan Raban is the author of Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, and Bad Land (all available from Vintage Books), Soft City, Arabia, Coasting, and the novel Foreign Land; he has also edited The Oxford Book of the Sea. Raban has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Bad Land), the Heinemann Award for Literature, the Thomas Cook Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Governors Award of the State of Washington, and the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, among others. In 1990 Raban moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.

Also by JONATHAN RABAN

Soft City

Arabia

Old Glory

Foreign Land

Coasting

For Love and Money

God, Man, and Mrs. Thatcher

Hunting Mister Heartbreak

The Oxford Book of the Sea
(edited by Jonathan Raban)

Bad Land

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, OCTOBER 2000

Copyright 1999 by Jonathan Raban

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Raban, Jonathan. Passage to Juneau : a sea and its meanings / Jonathan Raban.
p. cm.
1. Northwest Coast of North AmericaDescription and travel.
2. Northwest, PacificDescription and travel.
3. Inside PassageDescription and travel.
4. AlaskaDescription and travel.
5. Vancouver, George, 17571798JourneysNorthwest Coast of North America.
6. RomanticismHistory18th century.
7. Indians of North AmericaNorthwest, PacificFolklore.
8. Indians of North AmericaNorthwest, PacificArt.
9. Raban, JonathanJourneysNorthwest Coast of America.
10. Raban, Jonathan. I. Title.
F851.R33 1999
917.982dc21 99-028777

Ebook ISBN9780307797261

Author photograph Marion Ettlinger

www.vintagebooks.com

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For Julia

Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
Dun vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempte et ses convulsions

Sur limmense gouffre
Me bercent. Dautres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon dsespoir!

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE , Les Fleurs du Mal

Thats a funny piece of water, said Captain Hamilton.

JOSEPH CONRAD , The Shadow Line

I. FITTING OUT

H e was walking the dock; a big lummox, yellow hair tied back in a ponytail with a red bandanna, bedroll strapped to his shoulders. His plaid jacket looked like a fruitful research area for some unfastidious entomologist. I took him for a displaced farm boy, a Scandinavian type from Wisconsin or Minnesota, adrift in the new world of the Pacific Northwest. He held a scrap of paper, folded into a wedge the size of a postage stamp to keep its message safe inside. For what was evidently the hundredth time, he fingered it carefully apart and stared at the two words inscribed there in wonky, ballpoint capitals.

Pacific Venturer? he asked. The late March sun (this was Seattles first high-pressure, blue-sky day after weeks of low overcast) glittered in the pale stubble on his cheeks. Thats the boat Im looking for. Pacific Venturer. He spoke the name syllable by syllable, and I could see him in first gradea large, vacant, uncoordinated child, already far behind the rest of the class. You seen that boat, man?

Three, maybe four hundred boats were moored hull to hull at Fishermens Terminal. They formed a wintry thicket, over fifty acres of water, of masts, spars, trolling poles, whip-antennae, radar scanners, deck-hoists, and davits. Looking at the names around us, I read